The Good Wife Spinoff Elsbeth Is Too Much of a Good Thing

“These are beautiful shelves.”

This is the first line spoken by Elsbeth Tascioni in The good wife, as he wanders around the crime scene taking photographs with his phone, like a stranger who had gotten off one of the Chicago Architectural Tour boats and continued to walk away from the group. It’s the prototypical entrance for Elsbeth, who has often gone fishing in her own stream of consciousness, to the point where she snaps back into reality and offers some surprising information. We’ll meet her as a brilliant trial lawyer, but here she acts as a legal fixer, stepping in to help Alicia Florrock (Julianna Marguiles) keep her husband out of jail for violating the terms of her house arrest on corruption charges. . He’s guilty, but Elsbeth turns the tables so skillfully that the police almost have to apologize for her mismanagement.

That’s Elsbeth’s formula: a little crazy inconsistencies and jokes, followed by a clever observation or argument that surprises everyone who hasn’t worked with her before. Carrie Preston she plays Elsbeth with an indefatigable joy that’s both winning and vaguely unnerving, and armchair doctors have frequently diagnosed the character as “on the spectrum” for her disconnection from other people. It’s not that she’s unfriendly, quite the opposite, but Elsbeth’s conversational style is noticeably strange, as if she’s seriously searching for a human connection that doesn’t quite exist. That’s part of what makes her so effective at her job: she seems like a harmless eccentric to her opponents (and also to her friends), but she misses absolutely nothing.

For 13 years on CBS’ incomparable courtroom drama The good wife and its noisy CBS All-Access/Paramount+ spin-off The good fight, Elsbeth was the best guest, recharging the atmosphere of both shows like a sudden change in barometric pressure. there is there is no shortage of brilliant character actors A challenge for the crown: consider Michael J. Fox as Louis Canning, a lawyer who uses his involuntary body movements to attract the sympathy of jurors, or Dylan Baker as Colin Sweeney, a rich and homicidal deviant in the mold of Claus Von Bülow or Robert Durst. No one in television has as deep a casting quotient as show runners Robert and Michelle King, yet Preston can be counted on to give every episode a lift.

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All of which makes the new CBS spinoff show premiere on February 29. Elsbeth, a “be careful what you wish for” proposition. Now this charming agent of chaos who had appeared in 14 episodes in seven seasons of The good wife and five episodes in six seasons of The good fight is at the center of every episode of Elsbethwhich an abundance by Elsbeth Tascioni. When Elsbeth first walked into a room with Alicia Florrick, marveling at the bookshelves, she brought an unconventional levity to a dark time in the Florrick family, when her legal and marital crises had come to a head. And she also stood out in The good fight, as a strangely stabilizing presence amid that show’s carnival of provocation. But moving a secondary character onto the protagonist, especially one as fundamentally unknowable as Elsbeth, simplifies and flattens the dynamic.

To a large extent, the lack of ambition makes it a more comfortable fit for CBS, which has made low-stakes genre shows its bread and butter. Where The good wife found ways to reinvent the courtroom drama while fitting the bill, and The good fightIn the wilds of the streaming world, it could break loose completely…Elsbeth He quickly settles into a case-of-the-week rhythm that is satisfactory but much more in numbers. The only semi-clever conceptual twist is that Elsbeth is technically a lawyer, but in the show, she’s more of an unofficial homicide detective, slipping into detective work through the back door. Her amazing powers of observation still apply, but are mainly used to clean up sloppy policing.

At the beginning of the pilot, Elsbeth is the only passenger on the upper deck of a “rap tour” bus in the dead of winter, smiling like a Midwestern redneck in a novelty Statue of Liberty visor as her guide gently suggests joining. to the other passengers. below. She makes the bus stop at the crime scene and introduces herself: “I’m part of that thing,” she says. “The consent decree.” This consent decree gives her broad authority to oversee NYPD procedures, but from the moment she enters the scene of the first crime, Elsbeth can’t help but snoop around and bother the detectives with theories that inevitably turn out to be right. One look at the bathroom trash and a suicide becomes a homicide; Her first instinct about who-dun-is is always correct.

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The three episodes of Elsbeth made available to critics plays out like a typical episode of the Rian Johnson/Natasha Lyonne Peacock series Poker face, with a dramatization of the murder first before our heroine enters the scene. (Elsbeth (It doesn’t have the clever flashback structure, though.) If you’re thinking, “Wait, a network Poker face with Elsbeth Tascioni sounds pretty appealing,” that’s true to a point, although there’s so little variation in Elsbeth’s style and modus operandi that most of the color comes from the one-off actors who get juicy guest roles, like Jane Krakowski . as a ruthless real estate agent or Jesse Tyler Ferguson as a reality TV producer who, let’s say, makes a spectacular margarita.

Preston remains funny and mischievous as Elsbeth, who is so used to upsetting people that she tolerates their angry outbursts and is skilled at self-deprecation. (Since her name is not Elizabeth, she says, “It’s half the syllables, but somehow double the effort.”) Elsbeth gives you a top-notch angry police chief type to fight too, in The wire‘s Wendell Pierce, whose supposedly shady character allows the show to destroy an overarching plot.

But after watching Preston’s magnificent minor turn The remains, as an administrative assistant whose relentless positivity breaks Paul Giamatti’s bitter schoolteacher, Elsbeth seems to be missing a dimension that the show isn’t interested in finding. There is an intensity and warmth to Preston’s character in The remains that goes beyond the energetic optimism and whimsy that Elsbeth brings to every occasion. She didn’t need those qualities to steal scenes in The good wife and The good fight. On its own, it’s too much of what you expect.